I had my first exploding mesh today. It's driving me nuts:





It's just the fat morph that does this, and it only happens after I play with the fat morph. I tried making a fat morph that was just a copy of the thin version, and it worked fine.

Since this is a bottom, I want to make sure that the fat morph is going to line up with all the tops. Going in and using vertex data merge is not doable, since there are hundreds of vertices that would need to be changed. So this is what I've been doing; I thought it would work, but it only results in an explosion:

I imported the girls' pants with the fat morph. Then I imported my new mesh, switched the comments around, deleted the original skinny mesh, duplicated my new mesh, moved it to the top of the list, etc. (I was following tiggerypum's tutorial).

The only difference between the Maxis mesh and my altered mesh was from the knees down. So I made another copy of my new mesh, cut off everything except the lower legs, cut off the lower legs of the fat morph, combined the two, made sure the comments were still correct for the fat morph, and corrected all the bone assignments in the lower legs to be the same as the top part of the fat morph. That seems logical to me, but it just makes the mesh explode.

Any ideas on how to fix this (preferably a fix that won't cause an explosion in my brain)? I'm just about ready to toss this in the "I'll-use-it-in-my-game-even-though-it-sucks" folder.

Last edited by fakepeeps7 : 27th Jul 2008 at 04:32 AM.

SEE ATTACHED PICTURE...

You needn't use data merge on all the vertices, just the top row.
I think this fix would be quick, maybe 5-15 minutes?
Take your working skinny part, import another copy of that, and change it into a fat part by changing the name and comments.

Then, use data merge ONLY on the vertices of the waist, to make them match up with the fat shirt's waist. That should be what, maybe 16 vertices or so? (edit: I forgot to mention here that you need to rename the fat shirt to something like "fatshirt" so MilkShape doesn't think its a morph but an actual mesh.)

For the rest of the fat part, just select big chunks of it and use scale in the X and Z directions to make them fatter. Do this more towards the top, less towards the knees. May need to move some parts a teensy bit, maybe adjust the butt and tummy separately, but this is still big chunks, not individual vertices, and not data merge.

(this is the same method that was in my PM, but I think it makes much more sense with a picture... I hope so anyway! )

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update : July 27
I think I know why you didn't have a fat morph. If you were following Tig's instructions, and you were initially asked "create blend groups?", you probably said "No", right? That's why you didn't get a fat morph. I always say "Yes", and I work on my regular and fat stuff concurrently, just use hide/show when I need to. If I'm chopping up meshes and combining parts, I do all that concurrently on regular and fat.

Last edited by CatOfEvilGenius : 27th Jul 2008 at 08:16 PM.

This method won't work. I get an error message. Apparently, you can't use a fat morph as a "donor" for the vertex data.

It will work, you just need to rename the fat shirt morph to something else, like "fatshirt".
When you're done merging vertex data at the waist, remove the "top" and "fatshirt" groups, just leave your pants and pants morph groups.
I've done that before, so I know it works.

Last edited by CatOfEvilGenius : 27th Jul 2008 at 08:20 PM.

Thank you! That seems to have done it. I now have a working (non-exploding) fat morph and one very tubby Sim.

Now I can get on to the fun part: recolours!

Glad I could help.